Obama Seeks to Calm Fears on Health Reform
The Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal‘s world-wide newsbox lead with President Obama’s prime-time news conference, which was almost entirely devoted to health care reform. Confronting an increasingly skeptical public, the president tried to reassure Americans that the overhaul would improve their quality of care while decreasing costs. “This has to get done,” he said. Obama said this effort wouldn’t help just the uninsured but rather “every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage.” For the first time, Obama said he would be open to a proposal in the House that would help pay for the legislation by increasing taxes on families earning more than $1 million a year. “To me, that meets my principle” that the cost is “not being shouldered by families who are already having a tough time.” The president’s public relations push continues today with a town hall-style meeting in Cleveland.
In the news conference, Obama tried to regain momentum on one of the key items in his domestic agenda that had lately devolved into a lot of partisan bickering. But he chose not to use the precious airtime to make any new demands on Congress, choosing instead to sound “cerebral” by getting “into policy specifics for nearly an hour,” notes the NYT. And while Obama made a point of trying to speak directly to the American public, whom he described as “understandably queasy about the huge deficits and debt,” the WP notes he “struggled to explain” how any of the measures making their way through Congress would bring down health care costs. In fact, it’s not clear the public really understood everything he had to say. The LAT points out that Obama “relied on jargon that Washington insiders embrace but that might leave the typical television viewer mystified.” In what seems to be a clear bid to win over conservative House Democrats, Obama emphasized his support for creating a panel of independent experts that could set Medicare reimbursement rates.
The WSJ notices that Obama talked about the legislation as “health-insurance reform” rather than health care reform, “in an apparent effort to suggest he is overhauling health insurance, which has negative connotations for many Americans, as opposed to health care.” Continuing this trend, he also talked about the “record profits” that insurance companies are making at a time when many Americans are suffering. Obama denied he was putting pressure on Congress to act before the August recess for political reasons. “I’m rushed because I get letters every day from families that are being clobbered by health care costs.”
Earlier in the day, Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch from Utah withdrew from the bipartisan group of senators who were discussing legislation due to what he described as the “rushed approach.”
The NYT talks to a “senior Democratic aide on Capitol Hill” who said party leaders think Obama needs to start being more specific about what should be included in the bill, instead of simply pressuring lawmakers to get moving. “The president needs to step in more forcefully and start making some decisions,” he said.
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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072203504.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/us/politics/23obama.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-07-22-obama_N.htm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124826847772072017.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-healthcare23-2009jul23,0,1891409.story
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Insurer-Owned Consulting Firm Often Cited in Health Debate
The WP points out that a consulting firm Republicans love to cite to bolster their case against some aspect of health care reform is owned by UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest insurers. In fact, it’s part of a UnitedHealth subsidiary that was accused of distributing bad data to get consumers to pay for more medical expenses. The company denied any wrongdoing but reached a $50 million settlement with the New York attorney general and a $350 million settlement with the American Medical Association. The Lewin Group insists it has a wide variety of clients and its research is not affected by its corporate owner but also acknowledged that a study that contradicts a client’s position might never be released.
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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072203696.html
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Employers Are Far From Unified Against Overhaul
The WP fronts a look at how even though the national business lobby has launched a campaign against health care reform, the business community is hardly unified on the issue. While many businesses do agree that the legislation making its way through Congress would be a jobs killer, others think it’s about time something is done to fix a broken system. While many might not be vociferously supporting the reform efforts, they’re still not campaigning against it, illustrating how “the alliances that previously scuttled health-care reform may be scrambled this time around.”
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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072203662.html
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Clinton Speaks of Shielding Mideast From Iran
The NYT fronts Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement that the United States could extend a “defense umbrella” to protect allies in the region if Iran develops nuclear weapons. She made the statement to a Thai television program during her visit to Southeast Asia and immediately sparked controversy.
Some diplomats said they saw her statement as implying that the Obama administration has given up on trying to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon in the first place, an analysis that Clinton herself later denied. Still, some interpreted the remarks as an attempt to make it clear to Tehran that there are other ways to counter its nuclear goals besides diplomacy as well as a message to other countries in the region that might be thinking about pursuing a nuclear program in response to Iranian efforts.
Although the “defense umbrella” plan is hardly surprising and was largely expected, Clinton is the first senior official to mention it publicly.
Clinton also continued to express concern over the possible “transfer of nuclear technology” from North Korea to Burma and called on foreign ministers to work together to achieve North Korea’s “irreversible denuclearization.”
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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/world/asia/23diplo.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124826266087471853.html
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Wall St. Jacks Up Pay After Bailouts
On Wall Street, pay is “rocketing back” to pre-crisis proportions, according to the Washington Post. So far this year, the top six U.S. banks have set aside $74 billion to pay employees, up from $60 billion in the same time period last year. The increase has angered some in Washington, where a committee vote on a bill to increase oversight of Wall Street pay has been scheduled for Tuesday. At the press conference last night, Obama responded to a question about the pay practice. “With respect to compensation,” he said, “I’d like to think that people would feel a little remorse and feel embarrassed and would not get million-dollar or multimillion-dollar bonuses.”
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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072203687.html
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Government Takes Over Delphi’s Pensions
The federal government will assume the pension plans of bankrupt auto parts maker Delphi Corp. at a cost of $6.2 billion, reports the New York Times. According to the paper, this decision comes “after years of demanding that the assets of the company and its former corporate parent, General Motors, be used instead.” The deal will further burden the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which reported an overall deficit of $33.5 billion in May.
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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/business/23pension.html
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U.S.-born militant who fought for Al Qaeda is in custody
Reporting from Washington and Patchogue, N.Y. — An American Muslim convert from Long Island, N.Y., who was captured while fighting for Al Qaeda in Pakistan is now cooperating with authorities, opening a rare window into the world of Western militants in the network’s hide-outs, U.S. and European anti-terrorism officials said.
Bryant Neal Vinas, 26, is one of the few Americans known to have made the trek to Al Qaeda’s secret Pakistani compounds, the officials said.
Vinas has admitted to meeting Al Qaeda chiefs and giving them information for a potential attack on New York commuter trains, conversations that resulted in a public alert in November, said the officials, who requested anonymity because the case was ongoing.
Vinas told investigators he fired rockets during a militant attack on a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, the officials said.
He was captured by Pakistanis in November and is in custody in the U.S. He pleaded guilty in January to charges including conspiracy to commit murder for firing on U.S. troops and providing material support to a terrorist organization.
An indictment was unsealed Wednesday after repeated queries about Vinas from Los Angeles Times reporters in Washington. Until then, the case had been a closely guarded secret at the heart of investigations in at least seven countries.
“It is a massive case,” said a Justice Department official.
The U.S.-born son of immigrants from Peru and Argentina, Vinas was raised a Catholic and played baseball in working-class suburbs, where Elks Lodges mixed with taquerias.
His transformation into a fighter nicknamed Bashir el Ameriki (Bashir the American) underscored fears that other Americans had followed the same route. Their ability to train overseas and return below the radar concerns authorities.
“His background is clearly unusual,” said a senior European official. “I am not aware of other Americans who went with him or who have trained recently in [Pakistan]. . . . He stands out. A Latino American is an unusual profile.”
Since his capture, Vinas has been talkative and cooperative, providing a detailed account of his sojourn and testimony for upcoming terrorism trials in Europe, the officials said.
In March, he gave a statement in New York to a magistrate and police from Belgium that will be used as evidence against three jailed Belgians who admitted to training with Al Qaeda. He also has been questioned by French investigators.
Vinas’ father says he has gone months without knowing where his son is.
“The FBI asked me all kinds of questions about him, but they don’t tell me” anything, said his father, Juan, who lives on a cul-de-sac separated by a grove of trees from an expressway in Patchogue near the south shore of Long Island.
The retired Peruvian-born engineer, 63, spoke during interviews in recent days in the home he shared with his son: a modest brick house with white siding and a statue of an angel on the lawn. Many houses in the area fly the flags of the United States and the New York Yankees.
After converting to Islam, the younger Vinas abruptly left home in September 2007, talking about wanting to study the religion and Arabic, his father said. A year later, after a truck bomb killed more than 50 people at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, FBI agents interviewed the family, relatives said.
The agents told the family that Vinas was in Pakistan and asked about his travels and religious conversion, saying they were checking on Americans in Pakistan after the attack, Juan Vinas said. Since then, the FBI has not answered repeated calls and letters, he said.
“I think that the FBI knows where he is,” said the elder Vinas, a short, trim, polite man. “But they won’t tell me.”
Even during the years when Osama bin Laden’s Afghan camps trained thousands, U.S. recruits were scarce.
American converts from that era include Adam Gadahn, a fugitive propaganda chief; fellow Californian John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” who pleaded guilty in 2002 to terrorism charges; and Jose Padilla, a former street gang member convicted in 2007.
After Al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, the increasingly difficult and dangerous route to the network’s new base in Pakistan dissuaded many extremists.
Vinas told investigators he arrived at the camps in December 2007, anti-terrorism officials said. Despite Al Qaeda’s fear of spies, Vinas was treated well because someone in the network’s structure had vouched for him, investigators say.
“He had a good reference, so they trusted him,” an anti-terrorism official said.
Vinas admitted to meeting front-line chiefs of Al Qaeda operations to discuss his training and potential role in the network, officials said.
In conversations between March and November 2008, Vinas gave the leaders “expert advice . . . derived from specialized knowledge of the New York transit system and Long Island Railroad, communications equipment and personnel, including himself,” according to court papers.
Soon after his capture, a federal alert was issued Nov. 25 about a “plausible but unsubstantiated” threat of an attack on a Long Island commuter train in Penn Station. It did not appear that the idea went beyond discussion stages, officials said.
Vinas underwent paramilitary training and fired rockets on U.S. troops during an attack on a military base in Afghanistan in September 2008, according to officials and the indictment.
Vinas also had contact with a group of suspected terrorists from France and Belgium, officials said. Police arrested three of the Belgians and a Frenchman after they returned to Europe late last year.
“He said that he found a lot of people in Pakistan who spoke English,” a European anti-terrorism official said. “It was clear to the others he was American. That did not seem to be a problem.”
Vinas’ combat missions made him part of a trainee elite.
His arrest took place when he visited the city of Peshawar to buy supplies and use the Internet, officials said. U.S. investigators, who monitored the Europeans’ e-mail as it was posted, may have tracked him down by intercepting communications.
In any case, his leap into the militant movement seems remarkable. Vinas grew up with his Argentine-born mother and his sister, Lina, after his parents divorced. He hung out with friends of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, his father said.
Vinas is tall and was always clean-shaven, according to his stepmother, Rosa Gutierrez.
“He’s a good person, really,” she said. “He’s really normal.”
But Vinas could be stubborn and private, his father said. A dispute with his mother caused him to leave their house in nearby Medford and move in with his father at least four years ago, relatives say. The sister said she had not had contact with Vinas in seven years.
“I don’t know him anymore,” she said. “He’s my brother and I love him, but . . . I don’t know anything about him.”
Juan Vinas said his son resisted advice that he go to college. Vinas took technical courses and failed to complete them, his father said. He worked in nearby Smithtown but did not talk about his job, his father said.
About a year after moving to Patchogue, Vinas began spending time away from home. He told his father he attended a mosque and community center about eight miles away in Selden, the Islamic Assn. of Long Island.
The worshipers at the area’s oldest mosque, a white wooden building that used to be an Episcopalian church, are predominantly Pakistanis. The mosque president, pharmacist Nayyar Imam, said he remembered Vinas as a “very nice and always smiling, innocent” young Latino convert named Ibrahim. He said Ibrahim frequently attended the mosque for at least a year starting three years ago before disappearing.
“If I hadn’t heard the FBI charges, I wouldn’t have believed that he’s the kind of person who would do this,” he said. “He was always by himself, he never hung out with the other youngsters, who played basketball and studied or anything.”
Imam said that he talked periodically to FBI and Homeland Security officials and stayed alert for suspicious behavior.
“I keep an eye like a hawk on this place,” Imam said.
On the other hand, a former FBI counter-terrorism official said suspected extremists had been identified at the mosque.
“There could be a person in the mosque who has some radical thoughts and ideas who the imam knows nothing about,” he said.
Vinas began wearing Islamic robes and a skullcap, his father said. He immersed himself in the Koran and studying Arabic. He brought over three Pakistani friends from the mosque on one occasion. He even encouraged his father to consider converting.
“He said there were some differences between that and the Catholic [religion]. He said he [doesn't] believe in the saints,” Juan Vinas said, pointing to a metallic relief of the Last Supper in his living room.
After his son disappeared, he said, he looked for him and asked around at the mosque, without success.
During the FBI visits last year, which he described as cordial, Juan Vinas said he showed them his son’s room. The agents took a computer, said John Sifton, a human rights lawyer retained by the family to help find Vinas. Sifton said he wanted to look into the State Department’s account that Vinas was detained by Pakistani forces, but had been released and left the country voluntarily.
When told during interviews with a reporter about allegations that his son had attended training camps, Juan Vinas slumped forward.
“I think, so many times, is he in trouble?” he said. “I don’t think he would be in trouble with, like, terrorists. I think he was in Pakistan because he was excited about the religion.”
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Full article: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-american-jihad23-2009jul23,0,4748631.story
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Obama Addresses Race and Louis Gates Incident
Answering a question at the end of his news conference about the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. outside his home in Cambridge, Mass., Obama said that the “police acted stupidly.” He didn’t accuse the police officers of racial profiling and emphasized that “Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here.” While Obama pointed to his own election as “testiminony to the progress that’s been made,” he added that the Gates incident shows that race “still haunts us.”
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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072203800.html
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Authorities search Houston office of Jackson’s physician
The LAT fronts news that a team of federal drug agents and police officers searched the Houston office of Dr. Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s personal physician, and took away documents and computer files. The search warrant made it clear Jackson’s death is being investigated as a manslaughter and is the “strongest indication yet that authorities are considering serious criminal charges” in the King of Pop’s death last month. An official tells the paper the warrant mentioned the anesthetic propofol, which was found in large quantities at Jackson’s home. But it seems propofol was not found in the office. Legal experts caution that while the fact that manslaughter is mentioned in the search warrant can give a hint of where the investigation is headed, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. “All the time there are investigations where no one is charged with a crime in the end,” a law professor said.
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Full article: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jackson23-2009jul23,0,1554434.story
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For the Body-Conscious, It’s Now the Ankle That Rankles
The WSJ says that the latest obsession among the body-conscious is the fat ankle, or “cankle,” as it’s commonly known. Some of popular fashion items of the summer have “only added to the collective cankle anxiety” that has pushed gyms to create specific workouts and plastic surgeons to offer liposuction procedures. Even shoe companies are getting in on the mix, promising that certain models will minimize the cankle. Now a once-obscure term has entered the popular lexicon and joined other slang terms that are used to unflatteringly refer to body parts, including bay window, love handles, and muffin tops, to name a few. Body-image experts say all these terms help to contribute to eating disorders and create self-esteem issues. “Pretty soon it will be ‘Let’s start strengthening our toes,’ ” said one.
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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124830850199074223.html
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With ‘Med Pot’ Raids Halted, Selling Grass Grows Greener
Bill Shofner and Jan Werner at a cafe near their Lake Forest, Calif., medical-marijuana dispensary, with a business consultant, Ryan Michaels.
Sellers of marijuana as a medicine here don’t fret about raids any more. They’ve stopped stressing over where to hide their stash or how to move it unseen.
Now their concerns involve the state Board of Equalization, which collects sales tax and requires a retailer ID number. Or city planning offices, which insist that staircases comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Then there is marketing strategy, which can mean paying to be a “featured dispensary” on a Web site for pot smokers.
After years in the shadows, medical marijuana in California is aspiring to crack the commercial mainstream.
“I want to do everything I can to run this as a legitimate business,” says Jan Werner, 55 years old, who invested in a pot store in a shopping mall after 36 years as a car salesman.
State voters decreed back in 1996 that Californians had a right to use marijuana for any illness — from cancer to anorexia to any other condition it might help. But supplying “med pot” remained risky. The ballot measure didn’t specify who could sell it or how. The state provided few guidelines, leaving local governments to impose a patchwork of restrictions. Above all, because pot possession remained illegal under U.S. law, sellers had to worry about federal raids.
But in February, the Justice Department said it would adhere to President Barack Obama’s campaign statement that federal agents no longer would target med-pot dealers who comply with state law. Since then, vendors who had kept a low profile have begun to expand, and entrepreneurs who had avoided cannabis have begun to invest.
Some now are using traditional business practices like political lobbying and supply-chain consolidation. Others are seeking capital or offering investment banking for pot purveyors. In Oakland, a school offers courses such as “Cannabusiness 102″ and calls itself Oaksterdam University, after the pot-friendly Dutch city. As shops proliferate, there are even signs the nascent industry could be heading for another familiar business phenomenon: the bubble.
Medical use of pot now is legal in 13 states. It is also facing some resistance. New Hampshire’s Democratic governor, John Lynch, vetoed a med-pot bill this month, citing inadequate safeguards. Los Angeles, which passed a moratorium on new dispensaries in 2007, is trying to close a loophole that has led to an explosion of new ones.
John Lovell, a lobbyist for the California Peace Officers’ Association, objects to “the notion that marijuana is safe and can be used for any and all purposes to heal any and all ailments,” adding: “There are 34 different elements in marijuana smoke that are shared with tobacco.” He and others also complain about the ease with which patients can get pot recommendations from certain doctors.
Still, at a time of deep recession, the med-pot business is attracting career switchers. Mr. Werner was the sales manager of a Chrysler dealership, and dismayed with the collapse of car sales. He had a doctor’s recommendation to smoke pot, for pain from a spinal condition. One day a car-dealer friend, Bill Shofner, who also had a pot recommendation (for migraines), suggested: Why not become pot vendors?
Each invested $40,000. Following state guidelines, they set up as a nonprofit, called Lake Forest Community Collective, from which they would draw salaries.
It is on the second floor of a strip mall in the Los Angeles suburb of Lake Forest that also houses Mexican restaurants and a Peet’s Coffee shop. A customer first encounters a brightly lit front room with a security window and an Obama poster, then is buzzed into a vestibule with an ATM. Beyond that is a spotless room with glass cases displaying pot in pill bottles.
Scribbled on a board are prices, from $10 to $25 a gram, for different strains: Sour Diesel, Purple Urkel, Bubba Hash. Sour Diesel is popular, says a volunteer, and “really potent.”
This still is a far cry from, say, Amsterdam, where pot remains illegal but authorities are so tolerant that pot is available in coffeehouses.
In California, pot sales, legal and illegal, are estimated to total $14 billion a year. Medical marijuana makes up maybe an eighth of that, says Dale Gieringer, director of the state’s chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He estimates the state has three million pot smokers, including 350,000 with doctors’ recommendations.
The state taxes med-pot sales, and on Tuesday, the city of Oakland added its own special tax.
In Lake Forest, Messrs. Werner and Shofner pay about $4,000 for a pound of marijuana, retailing it for about $6,000. They don’t break even yet, the two say.
The business is a little like selling cars in one way, Mr. Shofner says: The longer they hold their stock, the less it is worth. Aging marijuana loses both potency and weight.
Med-pot sellers say they generally avoid marijuana from Mexican cartels; the risks are higher and the quality is lower. Messrs. Werner and Shofner say they at first bought largely from far-northern California, where clandestine growers also supply the underground market.
For reasons of cost and consistency, they have been taking fuller control of the supply chain. A few months ago they gave money to members of their collective for grow lamps and other equipment, and now they get much of their supply from them. “It’s like McDonald’s” making deals with potato farmers, Mr. Werner says.
Some vendors are toying with another familiar business model: vertical integration. In pot, that means growing as well as dealing. This was a risky approach when a federal raid could cost an owner his pot, his computers and maybe even his liberty. Now, one Los Angeles-area med-pot vendor says he has acquired land in Northern California and begun to grow his own.
Mr. Werner and his partner recently decided to expand. They signed leases for two new outlets.
They also have lost their wariness of advertising. The proliferation of dealers makes promotion essential. The two now pay several hundred dollars a month for ads on Web sites like Weedmaps.com, which helps people find medical pot.
Justin Hartfield, who started Weedmaps, says it has grown quickly to about $20,000 in monthly revenue, half from ads.
The rest comes from referring people to doctors who recommend pot. Mr. Hartfield bills the doctors $20 for each patient he sends them. The American Medical Association ethics code says payment for referrals is unethical. Mr. Hartfield says the doctors are keenly aware of the ethics issue and consider their payments not to be fees for referral but “advertising fees that change every month.”
Shane Stuart, 23, says he used to buy weed from street dealers but in February saw an online ad for a pot-friendly doctor. He realized then, he says, that medical marijuana was becoming more mainstream and having a pot ID card wouldn’t hurt him with employers. He came away from a $200 doctor visit with a note recommending pot for pain from a hyperextended knee.
Mr. Hartfield, the Weedmaps impresario, has a doctor’s recommendation for marijuana “to ease my anxiety and help with my insomnia.” Mr. Hartfield says the med-pot system is really just a way of legalizing marijuana for anyone who wants to smoke. He says his anxiety/insomnia isn’t really serious enough to require treatment. “I’m fine. I don’t really have it,” he says. “The medical system is a total farce. I’m an example of that. It just needs to be legal.”
Med-pot advocates say marijuana can ease chronic pain, spur appetite in anorexics or chemotherapy patients, and relieve eyeball pressure in glaucoma patients. The law voters approved in 1996 listed several conditions that might be helped but said so long as a doctor recommended pot, all “seriously ill Californians” had a right to it for “any…illness for which marijuana provides relief.”
David Allen, a former Mississippi heart surgeon, last month opened a general practice in Sacramento and listed himself on a Web site as a pot-friendly doctor. Marijuana, says Dr. Allen, 57, “helps the common conditions that affect every human being — for instance, anxiety, depression, insomnia and anorexia” — and can relieve certain arthritis symptoms and muscle-spasm conditions.
Still, he says, many of his patients are people who already used pot but just wanted a doctor’s recommendation to avoid legal trouble. “If I was to deny them, I would put them at more risk, and I’d be hurting society by doing this as well,” he says. “Cannabis is safer than aspirin.”
Dr. Allen smokes pot for insomnia, anxiety and stress. He says he quit heart surgery because what he does now is more lucrative. He says he doesn’t pay for referrals, a practice he considers unethical.
As the business matures, ancillary ventures are springing up. In Oakland, OD Media manages advertising and branding for about a dozen pot clients. An Oakland lawyer, James Anthony, and three partners have started a firm called Harborside Management Associates to give dealers business advice. A pot activist named Richard Cowan has opened what he envisions as an investment bank for pot-related businesses, called General Marijuana.
Mr. Cowan is also chief financial officer of Cannabis Science Inc., which is trying to market a pot lozenge for nonsmokers. It was founded by Steve Kubby, a longtime medical-marijuana advocate who a decade ago was acquitted of a pot-growing charge but briefly jailed for having illegal mushrooms in his home. Mr. Kubby says there is “no more alternative culture” at the company, which went public in March and has hired a former pharmaceutical-industry scientist to try to win Food and Drug Administration approval for the lozenge. Mr. Kubby left as CEO this month in a dispute with the board.
Part of the opposition medical marijuana continues to face is rooted in concern that unsavory characters from the illegal-drugs business will get involved. The city attorney of Lake Forest, where Messrs. Werner and Shofner have their store, recently sent a letter to the landlords of pot dispensaries asking them to evict tenants. Mr. Shofner says he reached a settlement with his landlord to stay.
To defend their interests, some pot proprietors are hiring lobbyists. Messrs. Shofner and Werner pay consulting fees to Ryan Michaels, a political organizer with an expertise in med-pot compliance issues.
There are signs medical pot’s increasing business legitimacy is crowding the market. A 20-mile stretch of Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley now has close to 100 places to buy. “So many dispensaries have come along, the prices are dropping,” says one operator, Calvin Frye. Two years ago, his least expensive pot was about $60 for an eighth of an ounce. Now it is $45.
Across the country, a med-pot bill is working its way through New York’s state legislature. If it makes it, entrepreneurs are getting ready.
Larry Lodi, a 49-year-old Little League umpire from Long Island, spent two days at Oaksterdam University in May, learning the fine points of cultivation and distribution. Mr. Lodi envisions a business that would link the growers and the sellers of medical marijuana. “I want to be the middleman,” he says.
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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124829403893673335.html
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Full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2223464/
